Hide and Seek (12 page)

That was the movie at the Colony tonight. Kim shivered.

"I'm spooked already."

All of them turned to me.

"Clan?" said Casey.

I shrugged. "Why not?"

She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. It was the kind of kiss you get from grandmothers on your tenth birthday.

"It's settled then."

She drained her chocolate egg cream. Steve's straw gurgled in the bottom of his glass.

"When do we go?"

"What's wrong with tonight?"

"Sooner the better."

Kim was hopping around in her seat by now. "Okay, so what do wp hrinrf?"

wA? Wl III.

"Despite what Casey says, I'd suggest flashlights," I told them. She started to object.

"We don't have to use them, Case. But just to be on the safe side.

That house is pretty old, you know. Floors start to go in old houses, things fall down on you. I don't think if one of us got hurt we'd want to depend on matches."

Steve held up the bandaged hand. "He's right."

"I'd also suggest a couple six-packs. Apart from that, Ican'tthink of anything."

"limp?"

"Midnight, of course," said Kimberley.

Casey nodded. "We should meet say at Dan's place at eleven, eleven-thirty."

"Right"

There was a silence then. Everybody smiled at one another. I think we all felt pretty silly. Kim started to giggle.

"You've had some dumb ideas, Casey. But this one ..."

"Thanks."

"I mean really."

"I appreciate it."

"Ghosts, for god's sake!" She threw up her hands. For a moment there was something very Old Testament about it. In Harmon's. A blond girl in shorts. Praying.

There was a lot I had to tell them about the Crouch place, but I waited.

My feeling was that telling them right away would only end in Casey's finding some way around it. A few handy rationalizations here and there and she'd have us going along with no trouble whatsoever.

It seemed my best chance would be to try throwing a scare into them at the last minute and hope somebody balked. I wasn't crazy about The Love Bug either, but it was preferable to something that could get me arrested. None of them had ever been caught at anything. I had. I knew it felt lousy. The old stories about Ben and Mary bothered me a whole lot less than the off chance that some nosy local farmer would drive by and realize there was somebody inside there and call the police. I never really credited Rafferty's speculations about strange disappearances, but I credited bad luck. I credited that, all right.

We met at my apartment.

Casey showed up in the same blue halter top and cream shorts, looking like she was ready for a picnic. I told her that if the night turned cold, she was going to freeze out there. She dipped into the green book bag and pulled out the corner of an army shirt, looking at me as if to say, no small objections, thanks. I made no more of them.

Kim wore overalls over a yellow cotton blouse. Both had seen some use.

It was a good choice, practical for the kind of thing we were doing.

Predictably Steven's shirt was bright with tropical colors -greens, yellows and red-orange-worn over white linen slacks. The swathe of bandage on his hand made him look like an injured tourist in a banana republic. As usual he was last to arrive.

"You're gonna be a mess in that," I told him.

He shrugged. "I'll get clean again."

There were three flashlights between us. Kim had found out hers was broken. I told her she could have mine. It wasn't chivalry.

I still wasn't counting on anything to happen tonight. I still hoped I could talk them out of it.

We got into the blue Le Baron, and Steven got behind the wheel, and we started off through town.

I waited until we were out on the coast road, with all the houselights and streetlights behind us for maximum effect, and then I spun my little story for them.

I told them about the doctor being afraid and made it sound worse than Rafferty had told it. I told them about the caves and about Ben and Mary being imbeciles who were driven off their land through somebody's greed and made them sound as vengeful as I dared.

Then I wrapped it up.

"Steve, you said there was a light in the house that night. I said bullshit. But suppose you were right? Suppose it's them, in from the caves? Are you folks absolutely sure you'd want to meet up with them in the dark?"

For a while nobody talked, and the atmosphere got pretty strange inside the car. I knew I'd done okay. If I was ever going to turn them back, I'd just taken my best shot. I'd made it weird and spooky. It was so quiet in there you could hear the wind whistle over the hood and the tires thumping over bad road. And there was nobody around for miles.

Pretty good place for a ghost story.

It hung in the air a long moment. I could feel the chips stacking up along my side of the table.

For a second or two I thought I had it. Then Casey calmly cut me

Her voice was so ordinary-sounding you'd have thought I'd been reciting as hopping list. But at least Steve was a little nervous.

"Jeez, isn't that enough?"

"Of course not. It only makes it better. Clan, I want to ask you something. Do you really believe there's anybody in there?"

"There could be."

"I didn't ask you that. I asked you if you really believed there was.

The truth, Clan."

"I'm really not nuts about going in there, Case."

"You're hedging."

Ill

I could have lied to her. I could have said, sure, I'm about ninety percent certain the devil's rolling around in there-but I didn't. I couldn't. We'd both said a lot to each other just the night before. It wasn't a great time to start lying.

"Okay. No, I don't think there is. But I want you to know... there

As limp as wilted lettuce.

Casey smiled. "See? Just as I said. The possibility makes it all the nicer. It was a good try, Clan. Don't worry. If the cops show, we'll cover for you."

"Great."

How she meant to do that I didn't know. Only that she'd read me like a book. And knowing her, I couldn't entirely put it past her. Maybe she had some disappearing act for me in that green bag she was holding in her lap-holding very tightly. I wondered what was in there besides the army shirt. It looked bulky.

I kept kicking myself. Maybe I'd played it badly. Maybe if I'd told them sooner.

We were off to do something dumb again.

Maybe we'd done things just as stupid before but about this one I had a very bad feeling. I could have said forget it, take me home. I could have said I'd wait in the car. I considered both things, then rejected them. It wasn't that I was proving anything, that I was worried about Casey's reaction. I'd have lost a few points. But she'd have gotten over it.

The problem wasn't that. The problem was that without me it would be the three of them alone there. She'd do it anyway. And the way Kim was giggling beside me again and the way Steve was driving they'd go along no matter what I did. The three of those clowns alone in there.

That thought bothered me.

If anything went wrong I wanted to be inside. I didn't want to depend on Kim and Steve to keep her safe and healthy. Nor did I trust her to take care of herself particularly. She was smart and she was strong, but she took chances. Bad chances. I worried about her.

And there was another thing. Something that now, today, I'm pretty ashamed to admit to.

You see, there was this idiot voice inside me, already creepy-crawling through a dark house in the middle of the night. The voice snickered.

It was very cute, very wised-up and cynical.

Besides, it said, you never know.

It could be fun.

I knew of a safe place to put the car, off a narrow access road through the woods about a quarter of a mile from the house. Nobody would notice it there, at least not till early morning. By then we'd be gone.

Even with the moonlight it was dark. It was one of the few places around where the trees grew tall and spread wide, covering the sky, black pine and birch and poplar. We parked beneath a stand of white birch. When we cut the headlights the trees seemed to carry a glow as though we'd irradiated them with light.

Beyond that it was black.

You could already hear the sea. A distant rumbling. There was no wind. The trees were still. Just the dry scrape of crickets and the faraway tumble and boom of ocean.

"Clan, you know this road, right?"

"Sure, Case."

"Any surprises?"

"Shouldn't be. No big storms this season."

"Then douse the flashlights."

"Why?" There was a tinge of whine to Steven's voice I didn't care for.

"Try it."

I knew what she was after. There we were in the dark, with the smell of damp earth and overheated car around us, listening to the mix of strident arid scrapings and liquid thunder.

"See?"

"Spooky," said Kim.

"That's it."

For a while we just stood and listened, and then Steve said, "I guess that's what we're here for," and the tone of it was more relaxed, and I liked it better. I suppose it's a problem, being rich and spoiled.

Even if you grow up pretty decent the only things you have to fall back on are the old, obnoxious habits, and they never make you look like much. In times of stress they come flying back at you like ghosts of squalling children.

We started off down the road, me in the lead, the two girls together behind me and Steve bringing up the rear.

The road was rough and pitted, strewn with rocks and studded with holes, more weathered than I'd thought it would be. If somebody twisted an ankle, it was going to be a very short evening. So I went slowly. For the first couple of yards all you could hear was the four of us scraping along. Then the road got a little better and our walking that much quieter.

It was eerie. Walking in front of everybody, I had the feeling of great aloneness-we four in the empty night. And even we seemed insubstantial. Just sounds of motion like the sea and the raspings of insects. Kim stumbled and cursed and Casey laughed, but aside from that nobody spoke a word. We were made of shoe leather and silence out there, and that was all.

The road got bad again. But the trees broke apart overhead, so you could see a little better. There was a dead branch ahead, and I kicked it out of our way. It made a rustling, crackling sound in the bushes, like a fire burning. Pebbles rolled along with it. On the dry road they were hollow-sounding. The air was heavy with the scent of evergreen.

Off to the left something moved in the brush. I stopped. The footsteps behind me stopped too. A moment later I saw cattails waving a few feet further on. We'd startled something. A raccoon, maybe.

Something roughly that size.

"What was that?" You could hear the thrill in Kim's voice.

"Coon. Possum. Grizzly maybe. It's hard to tell."

There was a moment's pause and then she laughed and called me a bastard.

"Could be a rattlesnake. They grow 'em big around here. So watch your step."

"Could be one of those cockroaches," said Steven. "The big ones. The kind that carry off babies."

"We had them back in Boston," said Kim.

Then they were giggling back there for a while. There was a little tussle going on. I turned around and saw him tickling her. She started squealing. I looked at Casey.

"I don't think we've scared 'em yet. Do you?"

"Just wait."

We turned a bend in the road and then just ahead you could see where the trees stopped and the clearing began, the long grass, weeds and brambles. Framed in the last arch of birch trees you could see the Crouch house, a single black mass against the starry sky.

I'd never approached the house this way at night before. So it was sort of shocking. If ever a house looked haunted, it was the Crouch place. Suddenly all the stories we'd told about it as kids came back to me all at once, and looking at it, you had to wonder if there wasn't a grain of truth in them, as though maybe we'd all had some instinct about the place, some knowledge in the blood and marrow.

How do you credit the creature under the bed? The monster in the closet?

you oo uui you oon l.

It was black, solid black, and because there was nothing but the sea behind it, it seemed to drop right off into nowhere. Like the end of something.

The house at the end of the world.

It was bad enough remembering the real things, the things I knew to be true about the place. The dogs. Starved and eaten. The smell of animal waste and bodies bloated with heat and death. The stacks and stacks of newspapers-in a house where nobody could read. The smeared, discolored walls inside.

But there was all the other stuff too. Ideas I'd grown up with, shuddered over, laughed at, scared myself with over and over again.